The present invention relates to a redundant array of independent storage devices, and in particular, to a storage system including one or more atomic resolution storage devices configured as a redundant array of independent storage devices. The storage system is suitable for use as part of an appliance.
In the hard disk drive industry, RAID (short for redundant array of independent disks) systems employ two or more disk drives in combination for improved disk drive fault tolerance and disk drive performance. RAID systems stripe a user""s data across multiple hard disks. When accessing data, the RAID system allows all of the hard disks to work at the same time, providing a large increase in speed and reliability.
A RAID system configuration is defined by different RAID levels. The different RAID levels range from level 0 which provides data striping (spreading out of data blocks of each file across multiple hard disks) resulting in improved disk drive speed and performance but no redundancy. RAID LEVEL 1 provides disk mirroring, resulting in 100% redundancy of data through mirrored pairs of hard disks (i.e., identical blocks of data written to two hard disks). Other disk drive RAID levels provide variations of data striping and disk mirroring, and also provide improved error correction for increased performance and fault tolerance.
In the past, RAID disk drive systems have been typically limited to use on server systems, and generally have not been employed for single personal or business computer use. Although RAID disk drive systems provide an increase in fault tolerance and performance, since RAID systems employ multiple hard disk drives, they result in additional disk drive cost and space requirements relative to a single hard disk drive. Further, the power requirements for a RAID system dramatically increase with the addition of each RAID disk drive and the requirement of a RAID host controller. As such, RAID disk drive systems have not been employed to a large extent for use for appliances or personal computing devices.
The present invention provides a redundant storage system including one or more atomic resolution storage (ARS) devices and a control system. The atomic resolution storage device is configured to communicate with the control system as a redundant array of independent storage devices. The atomic resolution storage device is a non-volatile memory component including a plurality of electron emitters, a medium having medium portions, and a plurality of micromovers wherein each micromover is independently operable to move a media partition relative to one or more electron emitters for redundant reading and writing of data at the media. In one aspect, the redundant array of independent storage device(s) is located on a single, semiconductor unit. In another aspect, a multiplicity of ARS devices are configured as a redundant array of independent storage devices in a redundant storage system.